Clint Worthington

It’s doubtful that die-hard Kenny haters will come away with a new understanding of or appreciation for the man. But for those curious about where he came from and those who want to consider why his beloved status rubs so many people the wrong way, there’s a lot to like.

A tight, restrained, worthwhile first feature from a cast and crew whose next jaunt into the woods will surely worth sharpening our teeth for.

By all means, watch it for Gaga doing The Most, or Leto pulling out the most eye-poppingly bad performance of the year with every falsetto lilt of his voice. But be ready for Gucci to try in vain to steady the ship and Get Serious about the all-consuming power of greed, and to yawn when those moments seem to linger too long. Believe me, I wish House of Gucci had a greater share of Lady Gaga death stares and pointed sips of espresso.

If Robinson’s style of humor puts you off already, rest assured that Friendship doesn’t break his existing comic bold. But for those shirt brothers in the Tim Robinson cult already, the Dan Flashes buyers and zipline pullers among us, Friendship offers next-level cringe packaged in something far more Kaufmanesque than his usual fare.

Despite its frustrating flaws, In the Heights ultimately succeeds in its aim to craft a big, rousing, blockbuster musical meant to escort us handsomely into summer.

While the Fyre Festival was infamous for its crowded venue, poor infrastructure, and slowly devolving sense of social order, Woodstock '99 feels like the OG version of that kind of entertainment trainwreck.

Despite the occasional tonal hiccup, so much of Unsane feels fresh and new, using bold formal techniques to spice up a complex throwback to B-movies of the past.

The Featherweight elevates its been-there story of middle-aged guys chasing their glory days with some smart, unexpected performances and a genuinely intriguing aesthetic frame. It might not deliver a total knock-out punch, but it gets a few good blows in before the bell rings.

The uneven quality of the vignettes aside, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is still a suitably Coenesque jaunt through the merciless trails of the American West.

It’s certainly the most youth-friendly and playful blockbuster superhero flick to come along in some time, a saccharine but winsome lark that also works in some heartwarming messages about the need to accept love from other people. Also, Zachary Levi flosses in a superhero costume, so that’s fun too.

It’s not up there with [Shyamalan's] best, but it’s a solid thriller that traps you in the middle of an impossible question and leaves you, like its characters, to figure out the answer.

In Hong's movies, conversations are battles, and words are weapons used to strike down the neuroses of even the gentlest of combatants. "Traveler's" is no different a battlefield.

As much as Lilly’s work feels like, and probably is, quack science, the appeal of his ideas becomes clear in his cultural footprint. That’s the hypothesis “Earth Coincidence” spends its time proving.

Miroirs No. 3 feels positively Hitchcockian, a recurring preoccupation of Petzold’s oeuvre; shades of “Vertigo” abound as characters attempt to replace what’s missing in their lives with doppelgangers willing to fill that role.

It may not have the sharp edges of a classic ’40s noir, but del Toro’s softer touch invites us in like one of Stan’s credulous marks.

With "Confessions of a Good Samaritan," Lane is in her most confessional mode yet, finally turning the camera fully on herself.

As the latest installment in what has become its own subgenre at this point, The Commuter serves as a fine example of the kind of tightly-coiled thriller that Neeson and Collet-Serra can do together in their sleep.

The combination of Schoenaerts’ intensely brutish, sensitive performance and Winocour’s singular dedication to tension gives Disorder plenty to offer.

Coppola sends us on a light, frothy father/daughter adventure, to be sure, but one suffused with the tiny tragedies of misogyny, and the excuses men make for their selfish behavior. Even the sweetest dishes need a little salt to bring out its complexities, and On the Rocks is no exception.

Formally, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel ... But this straight-shooting approach mostly works, even if it doesn’t pin Davis down as concretely as some would like.

An intriguing doc that juggles ’90s nostalgia with an optimism for student journalism that avoids over-sentimentality.

It’s a mid-budget riff on “Bullet Train,” after all—but meet it on its altitude, and it’s a bloody, funny good time.

Grief and loss can take hold of your soul, not unlike a possession; what Clapin explores here is the temptation of reconnection, and what that oft-impossible yearning can do to a person.

Behind Meet Cute‘s smart performances and effortless humor lies a bittersweet tale about the agony of choosing to live another day, of making decisions not knowing whether they’re the right ones.

Sopranos superfans will find plenty to love about the prequel film.

The evil that men do, a character says near the end, “tethers us to proof of the divine.” That Crowley packages these ideas in such a bleak, bloody curiosity as this is something to celebrate.

Cronin gets that the Evil Dead franchise doesn’t have to be limited to one wisecracking, lantern-jawed battle with the forces of darkness; the Book of the Dead, and its ability to turn those you love against you, is enough to hang a film on if you do it right.

It’s frothy and insubstantial, but at least takes its central idea — life’s too short, start a polycule — seriously enough to be charming.

We get to see Lopez command the screen as easily as Ramona does the stage, offering up a seductive awards-worthy performance that makes us remember why she became a movie star in the first place.

Always Shine is a fantastic thriller for two-thirds of its runtime, ending with a ballsy third act as admirable in its ambition as it is narratively frustrating.

Even as On the Count of Three tumbles toward an ending as unpredictable as it is slightly unearned, the bones of its central performances and unabashed embrace of its concept keep you glued to the screen.

If you’re looking for a reinvention of the biopic formula, there are plenty of films this season to set you up. If you think there’s still room for the traditional ‘true-story’ drama, Lion proves these stories still have a little life left in them.

The Second Part is a film almost wholly redeemed by its climax, a culmination of unexpected plot threads and surprisingly sweet character development that ends up making the whole more valuable in hindsight.

Like the real figures at the center, all the schemes and tricks and traps are just the way these men express their sincere affection for one another. That’s sweet enough, but the way their loved ones also get wrapped up in the game as well makes Tag, as corny as it might sound, a testament to the transformative power of play.

I still don’t know whether all (or even most) of Asteroid City’s ideas coalesce, so scattershot is the film’s pacing and plotting. But from moment to moment, it charms and moves in ways only Anderson can deliver.

Snyder’s momentum starts to lose steam around the 90-minute mark, and there are too many kooky concepts left frustratingly unexplored. But as a showcase for Snyder’s deft command of action and ink-black sense of humor, Army of the Dead is an exciting piece of brain-chewing fun.

It may feel like damning with faint praise, but “LifeHack” is easily one of the more tolerable screenlife thrillers of recent vintage.

At the ripe age of ninety, Shatner remains as alive as ever—his eyes wild with curiosity and humor, his honeyed voice barely worn down by years of voiceover and soliloquy. But he remains deeply aware of his own numbered days, which makes “You Can Call Me Bill” feel like something of a self-administered cinematic eulogy.

But there’s something surprising about its approach to both blockbuster filmmaking and Ryan Reynolds star vehicles. It’s at once a Deadpool riff and the absolute opposite, a violent video game movie that’s about how fighting isn’t actually the answer. And what’s more, it commits to those lofty aspirations, couching a sweet little love story in the CG-addled mayhem of a Ryan Reynolds action-adventure flick.

Upgrade’s sheer energy and the strength of its concept do more than enough to elevate this revenge picture into something refreshing and eminently watchable.

At its heart, it’s an assured tale of queer resistance, blended with the supernatural rhythms of the folktale, and it feels suitably transgressive for its gender-nonconforming characters. It’s sweet, and affirming, and hopefully opens a few people’s eyes (and hearts).

The results are deliciously off-kilter, even if the sci-fi world Stearns has created is somewhat clumsily reverse-engineered to make his central premise possible.

The personal doc can often feel stifling and self-congratulatory; Tavel makes it feel personal and disarming, an earnest and sincere attempt to understand herself through the father she never got to know, and the big, plastic box of wires that might bring him closer, even if just a little bit.

Whether as an amped-up look into a great singer-songwriter’s musical process from page to stage, or a deeper dive into the psyche of America’s most frustratingly composed artist, Miss Americana feels insightful and hypnotic.

More than a concert doc and less than an artist profile, Oasis Knebworth 1996 hits that sweet spot of giving misty-eyed Oasis fans what they want: A glimmering look back at one pleasant weekend and the life-changing music that defined it.

Romulus feel torn between Alvarez’s desire to tell a new story in the Alien universe and 20th Century Studios’ desire for a fan-servicey thrill ride.The frustrating thing about it is that, moment to moment, it very much works.

Skating fans and Hawk aficionados will find a lot to like ... But it’s frustrating to see Jones’ approach fail to dig much deeper into the man than we’d already expect, opting instead to more broadly elaborate on the low-key death wish a lot of skaters seem to engage in.

It’s rough, messy, and overlong, but may well capture the well-intentioned spirit of what it’s trying to do better than the compromised version we got at release. It may even be something I revisit in the future — just maybe not all in one sitting.

Admittedly, big stretches of Demeter are a bit overwritten and unnecessary; there’s no real need for a film like this to exist, especially considering we know how it’ll all turn out. But as long as it’s here, it might as well be celebrated for what it is: lean, effective nautical horror of a type we don’t often get anymore. Seaside scares are a rare thing these days, especially when Øvredal packs this much atmosphere and characterization into such a wafer-thin premise.

The Final Year may feel like a fly-on-the-wall production, but there’s an element of careful curation in the personalities and events shown that undercuts some of their earnestness.

Keanu gets a lot of things right, and almost just as many things wrong. Still, there’s absolutely enough here to make it worthwhile, especially if you’re a Key and Peele fan.

You may not come away feeling like you know much about Wheatle himself, but you get to spend an hour in his shoes.

Stone, Thompson, and the gang are all having a ball wearing incredible costumes and living up a squeaky-clean version of ’70s punk fabulousness, and it’s hard not to let that infectious glee take over for a while.

Whether you like Wendy will depend almost entirely on your continued tolerance for the baby-Malick stirrings of Zeitlin’s style: roving, evocative camerawork; the unpolished roughness of unknown child performers; treacly sentiment pouring from each horn blast of Romer’s score; or France’s storybook narration. At nearly two hours, that’s a lot of syrup to pour down your throat, and the unapologetic mawkishness of it all can rankle after a while, even if you’re attuned to the film’s wavelength.

For a first-time feature, Hall’s approach to the material is surprisingly nuanced and sensitive. There’s a matter-of-factness to his presentation of these characters’ respective dramas that feels honest and true, if a little unencumbered by formal ambition.

Think of Timmy Failure like a food truck: the best ones do one or two things really well, and commit to just doing those things. With McCarthy et al., Timmy Failure‘s virtues are an expertly-delivered dry wit that works for kids and adults alike, and a series of adorable performances, from Fegley and the rest of the kids to the all-too-game adults.

Aquaman is a pure piece of bright, ridiculous spectacle, hammering its Saturday morning cartoon sensibilities down its audience’s throat with a huge, cheesy grin on its face.

Amid Hammel’s acid-tongued approach and jaundiced eye, there’s a lot of intriguing potential; after all, cinema that imperfectly confronts is oftentimes more interesting than comfortable competence.

Maybe the formulas we’re so used to will be exactly the vehicle to introduce general audiences to the lived experiences of a community criminally underserved in media.

The intangibility of Jamojaya‘s storytelling is both a blessing and a curse: it keeps things streamlined, but also prevents us from really being able to dig into just what makes James and Joyo tick. But that’s what’s so intriguing about the picture, even in its flaws.

The Thanksgiving table is a perfect battleground for these heavily entrenched political lines, with Barinholtz’s smart, nuanced script pulling no punches. While the satire definitely loses some of its bite in its wild, unpredictable closer, the film still takes Barinholtz and Haddish to fascinating places as performers – neither of them have been as intense or vulnerable onscreen to date.

If you want to see a nuts-and-bolts look into the banality of evil, with a curiously strong Daniel Radcliffe performance at the center, Imperium fits the bill.

As these things go, two out of three ain’t bad, and it’s nice to see Lanthimos back in the saddle as one of our foremost mainstream explorers of abuse and malaise.

Vikander is a beautifully effective avatar for the American Ninja Warrior version of Lara Croft. Stripping down the bombast of the original games (and films) allows Uthaug’s reboot to feel comparatively grounded and immediate, without dragging itself down with unnecessary pathos.

It’s the kind of new-macho action picture that wears its cornball heart on its sleeve — one where the misfit leads learning to work together is literally, mechanically, the way to defeat the bad guy. It may not have Dom and the gang, but Hobbs & Shaw is as self-indulgently silly and giddily earnest as its fellow Fast brethren.

It’s brassy, breezy and gut-bustingly fun; unfortunately, it’s at the expense of the film’s drama and pathos.

For as choppy as Sirens can be in its too-short 78-minute runtime, it’s easy to chalk that up to the difficulties of filming during COVID. But what we do get is certainly crowd-pleasing, a riotous doc that combines likable personalities with thrumming guitar licks and its subjects’ relatable yearning to find their voice and their power.

It all gets a bit too loosey-goosey by its repetitive, redundant climax — there just aren’t enough good jokes left to cover for the fact that, yes, we get it, the bear did cocaine.

Whether the result of the film’s brisk 90-minute runtime, or a lack of desire to investigate some of its subject’s greater desires and fears, Love, Gilda feels breezy to a fault.

While there’s something to Ingrid Goes West and its indictment of insufferable L.A. millennial culture and social media’s dangers, Spicer’s targets are too bluntly specific to make the sort of nuanced argument that the film aims to attempt.

Despite Sorkin’s significant shortcomings as a director, The Trial of the Chicago 7 hums along mightily on the strength of its god-tier ensemble and whip-smart script. There’s hardly a false note in the cast, all of them capably handling Sorkin’s overlapping, erudite dialogue with aplomb, and many of the big moments land with a splash.

For all the unexpected charms of Emmett and Regan’s Last of Us-esque trek to salvation through an apocalyptic wasteland, Part II feels a bit more scattered and perfunctory than the first.

Liman is no stranger to tense, effective thrillers – his last outing was the criminally undervalued Edge of Tomorrow – and on that level, The Wall surprisingly works.

Project Power is a hard-R action flick with a neat premise, inventively handled, and a winsome cast to coast us through the creakier bits of the screenplay. More crucially, it’s also got a sense of humor about itself.

The unbridled mess that is Aline is just off-kilter enough to warrant a look, no matter how well you know Céline Dion.

While the focus occasionally gets lost in the filmmaker’s personal inquisition, it remains a thought-provoking, challenging cap to Greenfield’s life-long body of work.

Fukunaga’s direction is crisp and assured, if occasionally languid, and the script creaks under the weight of its myriad responsibilities to both its star and franchise. But it hits where it counts, and sets up a new chapter for the saga, a blank slate upon which the creatives that come next can paint a new vision for 007.

While these are major hurdles to the film holding together as a consistent exploration of its subjects, On Body and Soul is still an intriguing, cerebral comeback for Enyedi.

As pretty as The Creator looks, and however well-considered its world may be, it feels like all sizzle and no steak. AI is an extremely prevalent issue facing us in the real world, but Edwards seems disinterested in exploring beyond its aesthetic surface (e.g. borrowing real people’s voices and likenesses in perpetuity) in favor of a warmed-over critique of American imperialism in the global East.

It’s a movie made on the fly, and for better or worse, you can tell.

Strip away the pitch-perfect atmosphere and the genuinely unsettling climax, and his ideas feel shallower than they’ve ever been.

It’s a shallow exercise in gimmicky scares, but that might be its greatest virtue: it’s a horror film of modest aspirations, avoiding the convoluted mythology of the rest of the series by planting a bunch of scary stuff in a room and setting it off. It all amounts to empty calories, but it satisfies in the moment.

The series moves forward with the succinctly-titled Scream, the first without Wes (this new film is dedicated to his passing), and one that goes full-tilt into horror movie metacommentary, perhaps to its detriment.

The fundamental disconnect behind Massive Talent, besides its deliberately shaky tonal shifts, is that it feels like a career corrective for a man whose career shouldn’t need one.

As legal dramas go, it’s quite good; as a Todd Haynes film, you struggle to see the talent for which he’s known.

If someone decides they don’t like you, there’s nothing you can do about it. If enough people share that opinion, they can absolutely destroy you. Combine that with an always-fantastic Cage, thoughtful and buffoonish in every gesture and tic, and it makes for a delightfully mixed bag.

In What Drives Us, Grohl reminds us of the transcendent, transformative power of live music on both sides of the stage and makes the itch to get back in the pit that much more tantalizing. It gets lost a few times along the way to its destination, but the journey is certainly a lot of fun.

Its essential components touch on the valuable insight that the white imagination often can’t wrap its head around what Black music is actually saying, and the ways it says it.

The results are deeply, charmingly dumb, especially the extended focus on the tete-a-tete between our tic-heavy underdog and his murderous companion.

It doesn’t always work, and the results are more than a little misanthropic (especially given the cruelty of its opening and closing moments). But if that’s your jam, and the prospect of body-swapping assassins coated in guts, gore, and neon appeals to you, Possessor‘s Argento-soaked atmosphere ought to fill that need.

When it focuses on Eichner and Macfarlane, and the ever-complicated mores of queer masculinity, it stays charming and light on its feet. If it were a little less self-conscious about that homonormativity, it’d have a more cohesive identity, and be more of a slam dunk in the process.

As a teller of tense, personal stories about communities in crisis, Farhadi is an absolute master; but with Everybody Knows, he falls just a bit short of the greatness people have come to expect of him.

As a primer for one of the funniest, most emotionally satisfying thumbs in the eye to the super-rich in recent memory, Dumb Money is a pretty good time. That said, it leaves out crucial details and has little time to dig deeper into its cast of characters, making it feel like a cardboard glimpse into a complicated blip in the rigged game of American finance.

Like the superhero stories of the ’90s and 2000s that clearly inspired it, Blue Beetle feels like the scrappy origin story we need to get through in order to explore better things in the more exciting sequel. Hopefully, Gunn and Safran see fit to keep Jaime Reyes around for their version of the DCEU, and toy with the true potential of its hero.

Vibes can only take you so far, and Southern and Lovelace’s dreamlike approach keeps us from having a firm grip on the chronology of the times. It also feels like an incomplete chronicling of its subject, given its narrow focus on a few bands and the lack of participation of key figures.

It works, at least for a while — until the real short story stops and it’s time to get rid of the ambiguity.

Harris, as always, imbues his characters with a wearied conviction, which goes a long way towards making Stan feel a bit more layered than the feel-good Ned Flanders type the script saddles him with.

It’s a little too “Garden State” in places, but Johnson smartly puts a grim enough layer on their dynamic to avoid turning the whole thing into a treacly rom-com.